Spotify TV and Downloads

Spotify are going to be streaming free TV, you say? Well the good news for you is, I have no idea. Not to say I won’t be talking about it, just don’t expect it any time soon.

I was just snooping around t3.com and they mentioned it here:

Not content with jockeying iTunes from its music-providing pedestal, the innovative minds behind streaming music service Spotify have now set their sights on producing their own branded mobile phones and a Spotify television channel.

Speaking to tech website Crave, Spotify representatives said while ‘SpoTV’ is “some way off”, there are plans to look into the possibility, “to install Spotify on digital boxes at some point in the future”.

While there is no confirmation whether either the Spotify mobile phone or ‘SpoTV’ will be reaching UK shores anytime soon, the fact they chose to share their streaming wonder with us first, gives us hope they will do the same this time around.

Sounds pretty interesting, but what can it bring to the table that other services don’t provide?

Unlike the music market (which Spotify has taken the crown of) there are already a few services that offer free streaming television, for example: BBCi Player, 4od and TVCatchup.

There are probably a lot more than that, and a few that are exclusive to the USA also. I’m not going to mention illegal sites which stream movies and stuff, I’m talking about a legal way.

It mentions being used on digital boxes though… Does this mean we’ll be able to sit on our sofas and navigate through free streaming TV from our existing digi boxes? Quality of the stream and bandwidth comes to mind here. But I look forward to hear more about it.

Anyway, onto downloads. You might have noticed a new ‘Buy’ button displayed next to some of your Spotify tracks. Spotify have partnered up with 7digital to offer premium and free members alike the option for on the fly downloading, you can simply click ‘Buy’ and a submit form will pop up in Spotify asking you to enter your payment method. Simples!

Sadly it isn’t on the mobile broadband version of Spotify yet, but who knows?

While this isn’t particularly good news to Premium members,  (they can listen on iPhone/android and also sync playlists for offline use, which makes buying a track a bit redundant) free users now have an option other than subscribing to get access to songs on the go, which is good news.

A lot of premium members have been asking if the buy button could be optional, as it now takes up a whole column in Spotify, so we maybe seeing that soon. I would imagine it heavily depends on the agreement Spotify has with labels and 7digital – it might be in the agreement that every user has to be able to see the button, but that’s just speculation.

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• Spotify – better than iTunes for music purchases? (en.onsoftware.com)
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• Spotify Phone to Stream Music and TV Across Europe [Unconfirmed] (gizmodo.com)

Spotify Outside of the UK

What do you think?

or:  ‘Another Spotify post?!’

I have recently talked to a few friends who really like the sound of Spotify, as I’ve talked about before.

So, they live outside of the UK, that sucks. There’s no real legal way for them to access the kind of service that Spotify provides. So I went for a look about on Google to see what I could figure out.

First off, the only ways to listen outside of the UK is to either use a proxy (f.e. http://proxy.org) and create an account through that. This is fine, but after a couple of weeks from a non-english IP address you won’t be able to use Spotify anymore.

Or an idea which came to my mind the other day was to just… Get someone from the UK to sign you up and renew it now and then. That way it’s made from a UK IP address and can be easily logged into to reset the ‘you can only use this for 2 weeks if you’re travelling outside of the UK’ message.

I don’t in anyway encourage people to use these methods, by the way. I’m not sure how much it hurts Spotify as a company, but I’d hate to have enough people doing this to damage them.

Another question that came to mind was does the travel access on premium allow you to use your account outside the UK on a permanent basis rather than just the normal 2 weeks?

Also, what about mobiles? How do they figure out where you’re listening from? I assume mobiles have IP addresses tied to the correct country, and not where they were made. That or they figure it out by checking your ISP, since getting coverage on mobile broadband abroad would be hard. I would guess either IP addresses or that you’re using a UK phone provider.

Hopefully with the sudden growth of Spotify, it’ll be hitting other countries soon (maybe there should be an online petition made that nobody would look at?!). However, Spotify still have Apple/iTunes to compete with. I wonder what move Apple will make to make sure it stays on top of Spotify, will we be seeing the same type of service or a paid service with a lot more options? We’ll have to wait and see.

Spotify – Outside the UK?

After talking to my friends lately, they’ve recognised my love towards Spotify, which I’ve mentioned in this blog… More than a few times.

As expected, some of them wanted to have a look at the program. However some of them live outside the UK, mostly in places in Europe that are not supported (places like Denmark and Poland) by Spotify, they don’t have access to it. This is when it came to my attention that there are a lot of blog posts about using the program outside of the UK.

Personally I wouldn’t promote it too much, as it is most likely illegal to do so, although I do believe it should be able to be used anywhere (as I’m sure the team at Spotify would agree). The process basically involves using a proxy to trick the site into thinking you’re from the UK, or asking someone from the UK to make an account for you.

Amidst all of the posts about how to do it, I haven’t noticed any talk of this though:

When I try to login it says that my current country does not match my profile?

When you login Spotify checks the Internet protocol (IP) address that you use to connect to the Internet and compares it to the country you set in your profile when you registered. If they do not match and you are away from your home country more than 14 days you will not be able to log in. If you have moved we suggest you change the country in your profile, as long as you have moved to one of our other launch countries. If you travel extensively you can purchase a premium subscription for unlimited travel. In some cases this error can occur by mistake if you use Spotify at work as many companies route their traffic through other countries therefore you appear to be abroad. If you’re at work and have this problem you can solve it by logging in to your Spotify account at home once and awhile.

What that basically means is if you do use the proxy method of tricking the website, the app itself will give you 2 weeks while it figures out that you don’t live in the UK,  or if you’re just on holiday. It then stops you from listening to anymore music. The question begs; is this rule in practice or are people managing to evade it? Getting someone from the UK to log into their account or using a proxy comes to mind again.

I’ll be watching carefully to see if there are any updates, or if anyone else has an opinion or info, feel free to post.

International Texting and Calls

Once again, inspired by an earlier post, partly by looking at mobile broadband, I decided to look up International texting and calls.

For a while I was way too lazy to figure out if I could text to somewhere outside of Europe, like America. So I guess this post is for lazy people like me.

So, lets say we want to text/call the US from the UK, beforehand I thought this wasn’t possible, turns out I forgot a code.

An example:

If you wanted to text this state, and a city from the list, it would be something like:

00+1+city code+local phone number

00161211231234

The bit I forgot before was the simple “00+1” code. If you want an easier method of obtaining the city calling code, then ask the person you want to call (assuming you have other methods of getting in touch with them).

Note that I don’t know if multi-media messaging works with this (maybe someone can shed some light on how to get this to work). I do however know that normal text messaging and calls work.